According to their statistics smoking a pack a day from age 18-65 would save the country $5489.
I disagree that we should only be looking at medical costs when considering the total cost of smoking vs non-smoking. About $5500 per lifetime, is so small that unaccounted for costs could easily tip the scale either way. What effect does nicotine have on job performance. What are the costs spent in creating smoking sections in public places like airports. Do smokers have higher patents per person because of mingling near the ashtray, or do they have lower patents per person because they leave the room to go on smoke breaks? More data is needed, their conclusion is not conclusive.
> More data is needed, their conclusion is not conclusive.
Do you demand the same evidence from anti-smoking advocates, who focus mainly on the costs, plus a little fear inducing imagined health risks of second hand smoke?
I think it may have been you that made it about you: "I disagree..."
Regardless, they are advocating for policy on half the numbers and someone is protesting that, you seem to be opposed to the protest due to their numbers being inconclusive or incomplete, which is a related but different argument. Or am I mistaken?
Start with whatever answer you like, and then ask the right questions to get the right answers, and you can make a spreadsheet that backs up your initial position. All arguments inspire nihilism when deconstructed.
Descartes started an argument with one axiom, "I think therefrom I am" and logiced his way back to his initial worldview.
I kind of wanted to get into an argument about numbers, not an argument about what makes a valid argument. Because there are no valid arguments.
Back to smoking.
One of the more honest cost analysis of smoking is the chapter Estimating the Costs of Tobacco Use in "Tobacco Control in Developing Countries"(2000). The entire paper is riddled with admissions that they are using uncertain data, they are omitting missing data, and that even if the data was perfect the statistics relay on assumptions. They also don't calculate the benefit of early death and reach a price fairly close to neutral(1.1%-.1% of gdp). So yeah, personally I don't trust their numbers either. Thanks for asking.
I feel like it's several steps removed from that. All of civilization is about weighing cost versus benefits -- there's no reason to assume we'd cut old people loose first over the disabled.
Only when “saving money” is the entirety of your decision-making does that become dangerous.
Ultimately, money is only useful when spent — and despite intergenerational cultural difference, I think quite a lot of younger people like myself still want to be in a society that spends some of its wealth looking after the elderly.
Of course a rote analysis would show tremendous cost savings to just denying everyone health care or insurance coverage after the age of ___, if all you are counting is the dollars spent to extend life versus the economic productivity measured as annual income over the years that person's life was extended.
The glaring and obvious problem with such a naive analysis is the associated costs to society of actually implementing such a program.
We can conclude that smokers aren't exerting a net direct cost to the health care system due to their smoking, while simultaneously concluding that it's in the interest of public health and overall society to reduce smoking. Just don't tell me you're doing it as a cost saving measure!
> Still far, far cheaper than the hidden cost of alcohol.
The essay is not about the hidden cost of smoking, as you might expect, but on the hidden profit of smoking. (Spoiler: You have to be careful to define profit very narrowly.)
"It looks unpleasant or ghoulish to look at the cost savings as well as the cost increases and it's not a good thing that smoking kills people," Viscusi said in an interview. "But if you're going to follow this health-cost train all the way, you have to take into account all the effects, not just the ones you like in terms of getting your bill passed."
I can't see anything ghoulish about it at all. Seems to me if you only count the direct negative costs (treating the lung cancers, lost productivity) and ignore any of the cost savings (no long term end-of-life care because you died from the lung cancer) that's just a failure of actuarial science and lack of a proper systematic analysis of the costs and benefits.
What makes accounting for the cost of treating a certain number of additional lung cancer cases any less "ghoulish" than accounting for the savings of not treating a certain number of alzheimers cases?
No one is saying the singular goal is to reduce cost, reductio ad absurdum, but if you're claiming smokers are a burden to society because you did the math wrong and it fits your world belief and sense of moral justice, that's no longer science, it's politics. We can do both well, but shouldn't pretend one thing is the other.
It is ghoulish. It stupid obvious that people dying saves the healthcare industry money, but it's not a thought you should entertain because it offers no solutions. It's ghoulish because it promotes the idea that letting people die is "better" than trying to save them. "Here Steve, smoke another pack so you can go quickly instead of slowly".
Why have a healthcare industry at all? It would cost us nothing at all to let people just die instead of trying to save them. Diabetes costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat over a lifetime, why not save the cost and just let diabetics OD on sugar?
I think it's childish to consider it ghoulish. Yes, if you only hold one thought in your mind at a time and can't consider complex systems with multiple variables, it might scare you to consider that we spend a lot of money on end-of-life care, and whether that money is being put to good use.
Critical thinking demands that we can hold those thoughts in our minds, understand the economic reality that yes, absolutely, extending a life at 90 years old is actually costing lives elsewhere in the system, but yet despite this realization, after reflecting on the kind of society we want to be[come], we realize it's so much more than just a mathematical optimization problem.
That realization -- that we must do more than just that which optimizes outcomes for everyone as a whole, but also work to optimize individual outcomes even when it costs the whole -- is it not a core philosophical tenant of humanity?! How could the logical steps to such a beautiful and powerful realization be in any way ghoulish!
To your last point, the cost of having no healthcare system at all would be extraordinary -- there's no question that our healthcare even at 20% of GDP is a net positive for society as a whole (that's not to say it can't be improved, but clearly removing it would be an economic catastrophe).
And we're not talking about evaluating the net economic value of providing a given treatment, the context was specifically that of making a claim that smoking is/isn't a net cost to society. The studies intentionally ignored basically half the equation, so in my estimation they flat out lied in claiming that smoking was a net cost, which I'd say is academically fraudulent.
To improve people's quality × duration of life is probably more accurate; stopping people from dying (if you maintain positive quality of life, which is a big if) is the limit case of that, but not really the purpose of healthcare; real healthcare systems may delay death but don't stop it and remain valuable.
> No one is saying the singular goal is to reduce cost
But that is exactly what the argument is for why we must(!) eliminate smoking from society. Well that, and the also false claim that you will get lung cancer from a whiff of second hand smoke.
Like religion, gender, and sexuality, there is something about smoking that seems to make it nearly impossible for people from Western cultures to have a reasonable and honest, fact-based discussion on topics that have any association whatsoever with any of the above.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 54.8 ms ] threadI disagree that we should only be looking at medical costs when considering the total cost of smoking vs non-smoking. About $5500 per lifetime, is so small that unaccounted for costs could easily tip the scale either way. What effect does nicotine have on job performance. What are the costs spent in creating smoking sections in public places like airports. Do smokers have higher patents per person because of mingling near the ashtray, or do they have lower patents per person because they leave the room to go on smoke breaks? More data is needed, their conclusion is not conclusive.
Do you demand the same evidence from anti-smoking advocates, who focus mainly on the costs, plus a little fear inducing imagined health risks of second hand smoke?
Regardless, they are advocating for policy on half the numbers and someone is protesting that, you seem to be opposed to the protest due to their numbers being inconclusive or incomplete, which is a related but different argument. Or am I mistaken?
Descartes started an argument with one axiom, "I think therefrom I am" and logiced his way back to his initial worldview.
I kind of wanted to get into an argument about numbers, not an argument about what makes a valid argument. Because there are no valid arguments.
Back to smoking. One of the more honest cost analysis of smoking is the chapter Estimating the Costs of Tobacco Use in "Tobacco Control in Developing Countries"(2000). The entire paper is riddled with admissions that they are using uncertain data, they are omitting missing data, and that even if the data was perfect the statistics relay on assumptions. They also don't calculate the benefit of early death and reach a price fairly close to neutral(1.1%-.1% of gdp). So yeah, personally I don't trust their numbers either. Thanks for asking.
Then don't complain about people "making it about you".
> Because there are no valid arguments.
Well then, looks like we're all done here.
> They also don't calculate the benefit of early death and reach a price fairly close to neutral(1.1%-.1% of gdp).
If you leave out certain costs, you can indeed reach whatever conclusion you'd like.
> Thanks for asking.
Thanks for reminding me I have to check my reddit inbox.
Ultimately, money is only useful when spent — and despite intergenerational cultural difference, I think quite a lot of younger people like myself still want to be in a society that spends some of its wealth looking after the elderly.
/s
The glaring and obvious problem with such a naive analysis is the associated costs to society of actually implementing such a program.
We can conclude that smokers aren't exerting a net direct cost to the health care system due to their smoking, while simultaneously concluding that it's in the interest of public health and overall society to reduce smoking. Just don't tell me you're doing it as a cost saving measure!
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/07/16/128569258/the-...
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/16/the-h...
The essay is not about the hidden cost of smoking, as you might expect, but on the hidden profit of smoking. (Spoiler: You have to be careful to define profit very narrowly.)
I can't see anything ghoulish about it at all. Seems to me if you only count the direct negative costs (treating the lung cancers, lost productivity) and ignore any of the cost savings (no long term end-of-life care because you died from the lung cancer) that's just a failure of actuarial science and lack of a proper systematic analysis of the costs and benefits.
What makes accounting for the cost of treating a certain number of additional lung cancer cases any less "ghoulish" than accounting for the savings of not treating a certain number of alzheimers cases?
No one is saying the singular goal is to reduce cost, reductio ad absurdum, but if you're claiming smokers are a burden to society because you did the math wrong and it fits your world belief and sense of moral justice, that's no longer science, it's politics. We can do both well, but shouldn't pretend one thing is the other.
Why have a healthcare industry at all? It would cost us nothing at all to let people just die instead of trying to save them. Diabetes costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat over a lifetime, why not save the cost and just let diabetics OD on sugar?
Critical thinking demands that we can hold those thoughts in our minds, understand the economic reality that yes, absolutely, extending a life at 90 years old is actually costing lives elsewhere in the system, but yet despite this realization, after reflecting on the kind of society we want to be[come], we realize it's so much more than just a mathematical optimization problem.
That realization -- that we must do more than just that which optimizes outcomes for everyone as a whole, but also work to optimize individual outcomes even when it costs the whole -- is it not a core philosophical tenant of humanity?! How could the logical steps to such a beautiful and powerful realization be in any way ghoulish!
To your last point, the cost of having no healthcare system at all would be extraordinary -- there's no question that our healthcare even at 20% of GDP is a net positive for society as a whole (that's not to say it can't be improved, but clearly removing it would be an economic catastrophe).
And we're not talking about evaluating the net economic value of providing a given treatment, the context was specifically that of making a claim that smoking is/isn't a net cost to society. The studies intentionally ignored basically half the equation, so in my estimation they flat out lied in claiming that smoking was a net cost, which I'd say is academically fraudulent.
To stop people from dying. I think the point of the article is that the economic factors given in anti-smoking propaganda are false.
To improve people's quality × duration of life is probably more accurate; stopping people from dying (if you maintain positive quality of life, which is a big if) is the limit case of that, but not really the purpose of healthcare; real healthcare systems may delay death but don't stop it and remain valuable.
But that is exactly what the argument is for why we must(!) eliminate smoking from society. Well that, and the also false claim that you will get lung cancer from a whiff of second hand smoke.
Like religion, gender, and sexuality, there is something about smoking that seems to make it nearly impossible for people from Western cultures to have a reasonable and honest, fact-based discussion on topics that have any association whatsoever with any of the above.